The night fumbled with its noose. The feeble suicide of happiness. An opera of cigarette butts. A symphony of skin. Amid the epilepsy of the heart.

She once was young. Young enough to open those zippers with only a stare. Sucking on the remains of their underwear. Dining on the marrow. Of liars. And friends. Sucking out the cancer of their touch. Until the disease was hers. To manipulate. The calm cocktails of hysteria. And loneliness. Turning the away the curtain from that darkness. Choking out castles in the mud.

The sermons in their glances. Steady. Circuses of sex. To tame dead tigers. To wake sleeping lions. To remember. To forget.

To remember. The clown without his makeup. So happy. It's over. So sad it's done. Lost in the white of painted faces. Frozen in the promenade of red, red lips.

Wheelchair supermen and their addiction to the kryptonite. I want my fix. I want to be weak. And powerless. I want to know what it's like to be the one who's saved.

I'm your hero again tonight. But who'll be mine?

He almost said, you're pretty when you're hurt. But he stopped at you're pretty. The cull of her t-shirt chaffing at her throat. In flints of words so faded. The cumulative truths of dormant skin. The hourglass in his stare broken.

She put on the moon. And waited for the stars to notice. She whispered to the past in minor soliloquies. Testing each word before she picked it. Toting a special basket. For each piece of fruit. That had dared ripen.

She thought he was naive in beautiful way. He thought she was stubborn because she couldn't agree with his definition of happiness.

She could see the claw in the rain as the window waited for the weather to change. Life's infinite array of dominoes. Tumbling. It was why they fell on which they couldn't agree.

He said she was happy enough. Comparatively speaking. And she dared to agree. He said she was lucky. And she knew she was. She just wanted proof.

There are very few sidewalks here. Even less cyclists. It's a subtle hell spending your free time shuffling between the barnes and noble and the supermarket. Rummaging through soft, moldy yellow onions to find that one you're willing to pay $1.69 a pound to slice up and consume. Sizzle it it with your boneless, skinless, oh so very pink chicken breasts.

I pay an awful lot of money just to live and don't get anything back for it. Everyone wants to live, but so few actually do.

What is living really? Our humane definition of it? Other than farting loudly next to our spouses before passing out to the lullaby of so many commercials between reruns of seinfeld.

A job. A few children. And then retirement. Sickness. Poverty.

There are very few places to go here. Even fewer ways to get there.

The world is our shopping mall. Trying on life. Purchasing it. Only to find it's not quite as flattering as it seemed at the store.

We fill our closets with the costumes. And then never wear them.

There aren't many places to go from here. And even fewer ways to get there. I would drive. But there's so much traffic.

turning stones in my hands.
pebbles pushing the ocean.
solvent auctions exempt my whole.
all the pieces are strange.

the picture is broken.
but i can remember
the colors. the shapes.

i am not real anymore.
but i know i once was.
i am not strong anymore.
but i will be.

weakness is my epiphany.
addiction finds the edges.
soon, the rest will come.

He walked in an opera of corduroy. The sweet peppermint of menthol still burning his lips. A tiger. His stripes stitched together from a mosaic of used condoms. A hero. His cape chiseled from the dents in his bed. Where he had slept every night for as long as anyone should be able to recall. Where he'd been woken up every morning for so many years. The sun like a shovel exhuming his corpse.

There was sweat on the window. The foul cologne of summer brewing between weighted breaths. His thoughts wore high heels. Clicking vainly with each step. Making obscenely long shadows. Scalding out an aria from the bowels of his depression.

There were atoms to split. And mates to check. There were months to endure of skin too tight and sorting through the people he thought would fit.

There were colors to crawl through. Steep tunnels of doubt. There were sketches to trace. Subtle treasure maps.

And so much digging.

So much dirt between her and him.

Each moment a magic act. A profound illusion of happiness.

Her dress about her shins. In muted screams. In fits of loud rain that threatened to break the clasp her thighs held on her vagina. That musty breadbox littered will the stale crumbs of digested skin. The tall braille of an erect penis telling loud stories to blind fingers. In the stumble of her breath over the peaks. And the shush of her heart in the valleys.

Her underwear. Well, she never wore it. The grin of her breasts safe enough she thought between the cross of her arms. The advance of the rook. Two sips away from happiness. The sharp of the bishop. One square shy of clarity. The omnipotence of the queen. The ugly duckling cooing from within the forest of the sheets. The panic in reality. The calm of indifference. Paper demons wearing angels drawn in ink.

Her wrists that much redder. Her dress still listening. Intently. To the shiver of her legs. As her clothes dared to leave her. A small stone in so many squares of play. While the night speculated.

On the importance of ugly ducklings.

Given the likelihood that they'll never change.

You know that I'm different now, don't you? Not that you're here to notice. But sometimes I imagine you try to think back to her. Only she's not there to think back to anymore. Some broken dartboard at the back of a pub. Bathed in spilled beer and flat cigarettes. And you sit on the stool just the same as you did then. Eyes vomiting with the prospect of skin. Looking at a girl that wasn't there. Seeing the woman she still hasn't become.

The squeeze of so many time lines at the back of our choices. The convex of intuition turning good people into liars.

I know that you're different. And the same. Like everyone is. The stale of morality like Velcro. tearing away from itself.

I sometimes ask myself why I ever decided to change. The myopia of loneliness an ample sedative. I presume I was as bored as I am now. Though I don't remember anything other than the way they all looked like targets. The crackle of thought as it broke free of its shell.

The periscope of the obsession as it haunted the world above. In hurricane too small for them to notice. In catastrophes tiny enough for them to love. The way in which all flesh is dealt. In fidgets of and bluffs. In wagers meant to impress.

The way the change wore us for that one night.

But by morning, it was too small.

In scratches. In bee stings of sex. Sheets stammering with their lust. Her eyes remained opened. Obsessing over a shadow on the ceiling above his head. Some morbid metaphor for the fallacy of love-making. The way every color disappears when the light does.

Her eyes, they never closed. Barely blinked. Blind to everything except the souvenirs of skin in the dark spots behind his head. The missing colors in the burst of his cum.

The shadows never moved. The colors never came back.

Her bed continued to bloom. Her skin continued to shed. In tantrums of men. Candy canes sucked down to daggers. Flesh worn down to the itch.

Colorful deliriums croak their sober arias. Fat women in horned helmets. Pitted against an orchestra so tight. The nylons on her thoughts running away from the source. Tired stockings flattering the dimpled skin between her punctuation.

We say so much when we don't say anything at all. We sneeze the words out like a symptom. Because that's what they are.

The itch in my tits when alone isn't a cure. The scribble of cum on the bedspread like crayon. The raw meat of feeble drawings. All the ways there are to name the colors we hope are still there.

The bass drum in that last chug. Tuxedos of lost. In parties we call our lives. Purgatories of flesh. Salvation an abstract of skin and pores. A cluster of facts at the center of so many lies. Daring the remainder of the party to look. At the empty room. The half empty dress. That she thought she would wear. As calm as a used condom. As strict as the bookkeeping of a whore. The tick of every lover like a bomb that never goes off.

Heaven is real in every wrinkle of her lips. heaven is patient. If we are. But so is hell.

He had made the words tantamount. In concentric sequences. A fraction into a decimal. Just divide. A night into a tomorrow. Just breathe. In. The vomit of the honeycomb. Whispers of flowers stabbing through the holes in their own perfume. Cold orchards where fruit grows never to be picked. Silicone eyelashes on plastic eyes blink. Prefect wrecking balls for buildings already fallen.

I sleep, but I don't dream anymore. Not that I can remember. And even when i do it's so worn. The creak of the zipper undoing all that separate fact from fiction. In a world I don't belong to anymore.

Fragments of solitude like spice on the cake. Liars and victims one in the same. The astronaut in her Valium more real than the man in her bed.

Tracing one time line. Remembering all the rest.

So many us's to choose from.

In long daydreams that were too real. In empty skins she presumed would fit. The wedge of panic acting as a fulcrum. To mask the weight of the moment on tired faces.

The perfume of mosquitoes in its bite. As the darkness probed her. With the primitive anesthetic of loneliness. The little dolls in their little dresses waiting for some child to pick them up. Spare them the tedium of empty cradles. Those fragile cradles that continue to stir long after the doll is dead.

Stalling the years in unfinished sentences.

A calm abortion. A half tied gown. Her paper underwear smelling so red. A hooker of a virgin. A suspect of a lover. With ballet hands and a leaden kiss.

A banquet of tumorous cells straining to reach the full torque of their cancer. The long journey. From thought to touch. Everything is dead before it even reaches us. Every moment is gone. All colored in. Before we ever see the lines.

All the ways we find to travel back before only kill them faster.

A series of miscarriages was all she was. One dead child bleeding into the next.

Her life only a microscope through which she could see herself dying up close.

Every second of our lives we're travelling time. Tunneling into the future.Moles blindly chewing through the earth before of them. Choking on the past. In sips of Alzheimer's that taste like sex and smell like love. In loud bottles that can't be resealed once they're opened.

Drink up.

Drink down.

The middle is no place for anyone.

Every face a prescription. For a different future. Skin in doses. The crisp cackle of reality. As loud as falling plates. As soft as falling leaves.

Each thrust a treatment. For a better past. Skin in doses. The future an epidemic. The past in quarantine.

Every person.

The cure.

And the disease.

The movie was paused. Pirate's eyeliner and all. Brick curtains on every view. Of the statistician looming above his pad. The threat of probability weighing on his pen. In grunts of breath that borrowed their drama from novels he'd read as a child. Written reports on. Essays subtitled with satire. For the ways we pick apart the things that are mysterious. Until we are sure it is as impotent as we are. Memories bent over to retrieve their underwear while we imagine ourselves inside them once more. The wolves in grandma's pajamas. The big teeth in her bed.

They argued so loudly from below that she considered abandoning her weekly ritual of becoming one of the lead characters in some foreign abstract movie. The kind her and only a handful of strangers shared as having seen. All the way through without blushing or masturbating. Without dismissing the dialogue as pretentious when the dreams sequences took effect.

The tuna she'd had for breakfast still hiding in place where the toothbrush couldn't go. She grinned at the mirror with aged teeth. Finding the years she'd misplaced hidden in the subtle cavities.

Contemplating the crossword she's left on the kitchen table. In long sips of thirsty words. In the creaking stairs of people she once knew. Or at least hoped she had.

In diminutive heavens. In disapproptionate utopias. She had told all her stories. Licked the stars with a bitter tongue. Convinced the pain it belonged to her.

And taken everything there was to steal from the people she had loved.

Stanley Sagemuffin was a man of mediocre proportions. Neither slim nor fat. Short nor tall. Strong nor weak. His physiology was such that most men ignored him and most women pitied him.

Born into the middle of a brood of children. Seven to be precise. His childhood was laced with trauma from both ends. Big brothers boasting and batting him about like their shuttlecock between their own matches. Little sisters painting his fingernails while he napped. Drawing smiles on his mostly smileless lips in Barbie brand lipstick.

Stanely David Sagemuffin had never been important as a child. Not a football star nor a chess club champion. Not beautiful or handsome. Lost in a sea of precocious and marketable siblings he simply floated away. He waded through the duties and rituals of youth like a prisoner laboring on a chain gang. He was an unremarkable child that seldom caused any trouble and all the years that had aged him since had done only that. Made him older, but no less mediocre. No less alone in a sea of people.

He went to community college. He studied business and had a job as the manager of the local electronics superstore before he'd even finished his courses. It was there he met his wife. A beautiful orgasm of a woman. The kind of woman that makes strangers gasp when she enters the room. Beautiful right down to her core. She fell in love with Stanley because he was everything she wasn't. Stanley Sagemuffin could stand in the center of a room screaming at the top of his lungs and still no one would notice him. And that was why his wife, his gorgeous wife, Denise had fallen in love with him.

Pity mostly.

As to why Stanley had fallen for Denise that was a bit more complex. He spent 13 through 19 hating girls like her. It didn't matter how nice they were underneath the supple cardigans and delicate mascara. If they were pretty he hated them. If they were, like his wife Denise, extraordinary, he despised them.

Stanley hated his parents for having so many children. Hating chance for placing him in the middle. But most of all he hated genetics for falling asleep on the job when they conceived him. In fact, the one and only thing that made Stanley Sagemuffin unique was the silent rage that lay like a dormant seed somewhere in the foul of his intestines. Waiting quietly. Still. For a stray drop of sunshine to find it and give it life.

Most people assumed Stanley hated himself. From the way he stared at his feet as he walked. The way he refused to socialize with anyone. For how much he was a satire of himself. A cartoon drawn over the life of a man. In splatters of anvil. And puffs of cliff. Looking down. Shocked that the ground is no longer beneath him. But Stanley didn't hate himself. He hated them. He hated them all. For perpetuating a world where unremarkable children become unremarkable men.

But most of all he hated his beautiful wife, Denise. For as unremarkable as Stanley had always been, she had made him something worse.

A father.

Stanley and Denise named their son after his eldest brother, Sean. She because he had died in a car accident during his sophomore year of college. The quintessential all American football star on scholarship. Drunk in an SUV full of friends fleeing the scene of a gang rape on a freshman whose IQ totalled more than all theirs combined. Stanley still remembers. Still pauses mid stride on certain Sundays. His gait choked by the flux of testosterone and grassy cleats. Slide rules snapping on fat, fat goal posts. Long skirts muffling slippery screams. The kick of the warm turf under frantic wheels like a barbecue fragrantly killing that which is already dead.

Stanley did so because he hoped given the right name heredity might be nudged in the proper direction. Had they only this one child. This one and only he would never be forgotten. Never be calculated against. The domino lost in the center of the cascade. Neither beginning nor end. One tiny penny dropped into an endless well of wishes.

Sean, as it turned out, was not at all like his father. He was an infinite child. Brimming with as many answers as he was questions. He was mercury. As ecstatic to be alive as the world was to have him.

Poor Stanley Sagemuffin, he found himself hating his own child. For making his wife happier than he ever could. For showing him what he might've been.

She fiddles with the fairy tale. Like undoing a candy wrapper with her fingers. It's too easy. She sighs as she bites. Releasing a flood of caramel. Thoughts of her childhood suddenly more potent than before. Empty syringes puzzled at where the substance has gone. Sore veins miraculously strong. The makeshift super heroes of breast fed demon magnanimous.

The wolf slips out of granny's gown and into its fur. It's teeth forgotten. Like a child coloring with a broken crayon. Outlines too absurb. Hearts too beige to ever color in.

Clutching at the princess in her fading gown the emperor wears his close. His mortality his crown. His loneliness his kingdom.

Pick a word. Any word.

Circumstantial...

The clown in her crotch is merely circumstantial evidence of a circus that allegedly exists.

Substantial...

The Buddha in her bed finally found his nirvana in her dirtier wrinkles. Paradise is a dent in an old bed. A stain on a pillow. Paradise is whatever we choose to remember that has forgotten us. Hell is a substantial investor in heaven.

I held onto a postcard of a song that had too quaint a picture to turn over and read. Imagining the cliches on the other side of depression. The whisper of a dimming bulb devouring itself. My thoughts stale with the irony. Of every light that consumes itself thinking it's fighting the darkness.

The stringent suicide of truth in heavy bales. In wolf howls. In unfinished sentences.

Pick a word. Any one.

Pick a word.

Another self that will live on after this light has devoured itself.

Swinging from memory's loose trapeze. With a sundial grin and a fist full of yellow light. I hear the ambulance coming from miles away. I hear it coming and coming and coming, but never see it arrive.

The staple in the chamber hungry for the paper. The bomb in my wrist. Endlessly calculating the empty in my chest. Life offers an abundance of charming poisons, but none so enchanting as sadness.

Squealing brakes in her lips. As the words trickle over into valiant wishes. Shifting gears in her grin to accommodate the roads beneath. The Marxism of love too much for the capitalist in her head. The democracy of sex more than her socialist heart could overlook. Fragile campaigns of emotion no match for the politics of beauty.

Pretty pictures. Empty images.

I was talking to the ceiling in quiet sighs. The girth of memory narrowed by the coax of shadows dancing inside their jail. The laugh of trees lost in years too profound for flesh to understand. The returning of life year after year to dead limbs that somehow learn to be born anew winter after winter.

Conversations like formaldehyde. Embalming every word we've uttered. The graveyard between sight and touch a dense firing squad of drunken cupids. Cooing brightly as their wings are plucked.

I was asking my questions to the walls. As they paced amongst the shadows the sunset had drawn. In tiny wars to small to see. Those lives we thought were ours dressed their Hiroshima's. In high heels. In the pins and needles. Of dead skin awakening.

And the walls they just waited for the keys to skip their ropes. Squeeze another god from the bandage. The cold stroll of life drooling through the skin's careless mini blinds. Caught in the stamina of its wax. As it drips down the taper. The slender in a fleeting beauty. The dose of a boken heart. Motivation enough. To chagne how I feel.

About the dinosaurs in my bed dancing their last tango.

He waited for a chaste moment. The kind you share only with yourself. The smaller branches on an old tree haven enough for all the dead leaves he was ready to drop. The pales of dandelions. the shrug of tall grass. The future in random burps. The past in an endless coin toss.

He said he was tired. The barometer of lust dipping accordingly. He said he was too old. The broad strokes of age painted on us like white clown faces.

In little guillotines no bigger than an angel must be. We watched the beheading. The parade of corpses like flower petals being questioned. The liars and the angels all merging into one great addiction.

the bold nest we built upon its peak. Assuming someday we would fall from it. As every great monster must kill its maker.

The sum of the sum of the sum of.

With a calm look on her face she asked the door its motivation for being so willing to open and to close. With wrecking balls in every blink she posited to the darkness that it feared the light. Since change is the devil behind every blessing.

During certain months it's okay to let the weather inside. Spreading bouts of freedom one vice at a time. The relentless sandpaper of sex smoothing all the rough edges in reality.

Talking to imaginary gods with bubble gum between every word. Peanut butter stuck to the roof of her theory. The algebra of circumstance. The probability of hope. As cold as any equation she's ever solved.

The key in her walk. Long skirt echoing her strut. The diesel in her pause. A crowded engine of races never run. The lock in her stare. Weighted eyelashes translating the language of her hands.

Together we counted the links on the food chain. The echelon of evolution in bottles of rum. Putting everything aside to find the pattern in the chaos.

All to prove it was possible. To love what you would never want.

To want what you could never love.

There was a catapult in her grin. A guillotine between her thighs. Had I known her name I would've remembered it. Let it turn me like herbs do into them. The end always a storm adjacent to the start. The soft concrete in her sigh slowly hardening. It's a harsh metamorphosis from victim to villain. Rubbing those sticks. Begging. The fire to find you.

There are traces. Cold evidence of the crime. Truth swings in hammocks of sex. Content enough with the breeze that wakens. Those mossy tombstones. Those skeletons dipping into the breach of our skin. Answering all the questions we never wanted to ask. Dead bones dancing on the heels of sober.

Those eyes of pliers. Every tool. A face that has to lie to someone. Picking weeds from the tall grass. Folding the harvest in half. The hunger in hiccups. The words in the way.

As I try to tell him where it goes.

No tomorrow. No down the stairs. Only the scraps dredged from dirty fingernails. Of yawning breasts and epileptic thighs. You want it and I give you the art of humiliation. At any price you name.

We count the passengers disembarking the bus. Dull school children dancing on the finger of the blade. Leeches in every glance. Wearing the parasite. The grim astonishment of puberty the skin remembers in every lunge. The thrill. The thrust of high heels in each touch. Blood on crutches. Hobbling the endless course of our bodies. Until every last stop is vacant.

Wearing our hearts in rented tuxedoes. Long conversations with parties where I wasn't invited. The thump of sober in my chest while we surrendered everything. In brushes of daffodil. In pantomines of perfume. The world paused only a moment to wait before shuffling off without me.

Pale ankles showing over their black socks in an avalnche of men. Forever jamming their keys into the wrong locks. The weight of a shadow the most I could measure. And more than I could lift.

I could tell how old he was by the way he talked. Taking naps between each stare. The parachute in his grin. The anchor in his heart. I could say I knew her. Because I did. The itch in her ear when language betrayed. The numb of conversations stuck in wet cement.

We can choose the moment we'll admit how real it is. Feigning powers we only wish we had. We can choose them like we do whimpering puppies inside the cages of the pound. Admiring the irises of stars long dead before we ever found out they existed.

At the mercy of a universe bigger than we could ever hope to guess. On the shoulder of a world that never lets us see it weep. We remain. The skin it sheds. Tucking its dirty pillows under our tired heads. Chasing the run in its pantyhose. Hypnotized by the click of its heels as it paces.

Dusty bins under its bed. The abortion of our youth in discarded condoms.

We go through the ritual. The decision ejaculating within. Volcanoes spewing men. I am proof enough. A woman is anything she wants. I am a trial. I am a conviction. I'd rather not be found innocent.

I don't wonder anymore. But I still suspect. There are stages where they linger. Balloons slowly losing air. The timid coughs of seduction not the crutches they were then.

We don't choose. But may be chosen.

It was quiet for a while. The thunder in my backbone the only sound. I was deaf to every word I'd once read from their lips. I was sound asleep. I was wide awake. I was beside the moment as it choked out the miscarriage of another friend.

We're never addicted to anything other than ourselves.

There are nightmares I can only describe as waking up. Examining the subtlest differences between letting myself live and waiting to die.

Consumed with the inflection of words I'll never speak. Dressed in the poetry of their skin. Fallen into wells too deep. Chasing the wishes others have discarded.

Falling.

Hoping.

That parachute won't open.

He made funny faces and we laughed. He made sad ones and we cried. Very much like puppets are the voice of the people behind them.

I like my music loud. My sex louder still. Anger never lies. Not like love does. Anger tells the truth when touch pretends it knows what we want. Cut grass. Bad movies. All the trappings of lonely people. They seem so frivilous now. Phantoms of chalk haunting the blackboard long after class is done. And teacher is gone. The smudge of lessons still under thier fingernails as the students quickly forget. Whatever it was they had almost learned.

He massaged his knee counterclockwise to my approach. A caricature both victim and hero. As is every man in the presence of a new woman. Telling stories. True fairy tales. Of wolves in the woods waiting for their picnic baskets. Of encounters with big teeth.

I take my metaphors one dose at a time. The callous antibiotics time prescribes to the fevered. The empassioned. The minor moments that oce were so grand.

It's sad because if I wrote something beautiful an hour before no one will ever know. They'll wind up here. Dressed in the wind like orphans at the ocean's edge. Never knowing all that came before the force of the anchor in high tide. The boat cauterized to its moorings. Doomed to miss the hurricane. To watch the storm from a distance.

It's love because I say it is. Very much hating to use that word in anything I expect will be read. It is so because there are songs I can no longer tolerate alone. It is so because the world has forgotten, but I still dream it. And wake up with the hook in my throat. The hurricane in my skin.

Deaf to the future. Mute to the past. All I could do was draw them. As hopeless as any artist must be. Naming every stroke. Imaginigng the lightning could hear. Would listen to its own roar.

Wondering how I ever loved anyone.

Or if I ever would again.

The sky pretending to fall. To convince us we were getting closer.

Every moment is a memoir. Stepping through the graves of passed footprints. Frail bits of going back carved in a frenzy of escape. The shallow breaths of the life before this. The sad child on the rain's fingertips. Painted like red lipstick across a careless face.

Every moment is a word. Loping over the paragraphs of tales countlessly told. Fractured sentences that can only heal after the story is over. The thin dynamic between narrator and protagonist measured in muffled gulps.

Every person is a religion. Little gods shower their lovers with salvation. Each minute builds us a new heaven. And a new hell. Until we pity the gods we once worshipped.

Every encounter is a hope.

A birth and a death. A perfect beginning to meet a perfect end. And everything in between them only lies the skin tells.

A poet's only memoirs are the words she's written. The people in them.

He had the hammer close to his chest. A camp out. In the wilderness referred to as touch. An empty sleeping bag under his breath snoring out a thoughtless ballad. The cold enthusiasm that trademarked every kiss.

A contract. A mortgage against. Enemies and suitable friends.

In stages our eagerness would draw itself on the window. Like the birth of darkness whispers over the sun. In pale gags that crescendo into puke. The world out there simmered in each of us. Until sickness again saved us from ourselves.

The habit. Black and white as it is. The addiction. Frail suspect in the investigation. The crime a mercy killing. A cruel euthanasia extracted from each attempt.

Listening for the moment. The eruption of the metaphor. A volcano vomiting the past in angry kabobs. The discipline and the catastrophe of reasoning with my heart. Giving the truth away in awkward sobs.

It doesn't matter since I don't want it anymore. The perfume. The smell of disbelief. Discarded candy wrappers littering the floor of our hearts. Just the paper they've left enough to tempt.

In too many cigarettes it becomes clear. In thunderstorms it motions. Modelling. Gesturing toward dead witnesses. Still lost in a trial that pronounced it innocent. Like everyone is right up until someone decides to love them.

I don't wake up. Ever.

I sleep eyes wide open chewing on fishhooks that never reel me in. I tell myself I'm a clown so I can laugh while they do. At the smile drawn over my lips.

Sometimes it's only skin and I can say to myself I made a profit. But you can crack that egg only once.

She had bed in her mind. With a whimper she undressed. To little applause. To a poor analogy she hummed. Her future in her backpack. Her past in the sway of her hips. Scanning the topography of her suitors for peaks and dips. A liar. A woman. What's the difference? A friend. A poet. A virtue set to expire.

I put it under my nose and try to remember the smell of fresh skin. As unsteady legs learn the sway of sex's scaffold. Shakily clearing the fog from neglected windows. In the smallest of gestures. The perfect equations of the demon we call love. In x's. In n's. For us to determine the value of.

Spoiled moments. As soft as we were when the kiss first took effect and began to rise. And we were forced to punch it down. Wait.

For it to rise again.

The sanity of poets being measured in the braille of deaf metaphors.

If you can see. If you can hear this.

You're too close.